A/N: Forgive any discrepancies, it's been a year since I've seen this show (and it's 2AM as I blast this out) but the pain of Carter's death rings clear to me. In which, Carter doesn't die, but things are broken all this same. (I can promise a happy ending, if I ever get there).

It's like this.

Dying's never really what you think it'll be. (And Joss. Joss will remember it all, like clear cut glass, like the two puncture wounds for scars John will mouth over like prayers).

Dying's like this: the shattering clanging ring of a single, lonely tollbooth in the intermittedly quiet space of a city that's never silent. Or rather, the clattering, high pitched keel that never ends, even when you want it to. (Like the pain). It rings and it rings and it rings and it rings, and you—they— are helpless.

(this was never a story meant to have a happy ending).

It's this: the utter stillness. The way earth stops and draws breath under them, before swallowing them whole. Except, what about this is still, the trembling of their bodies, torn and torn and torn asunder, again and again, with holes where there should be muscle and bones where there should be blood. What stillness, well, certainly not in the tremble of his hands reaching, reaching for the smooth slope of her cheek, the promise of salvation, of supplication.

(There was always a bullet meant for him. You don't make men like John Reese without contingencies. You don't make a man, mold him out of steel, without kryptonite. Living was never meant to be easy).

And Joss thinks, in the fogged brown haze of her mind, that no, it's not at all like pain, not at all like the half of you that makes you human being savaged from your chest— as if she gets a choice in how she dies, as if any of us do.

The glass yellow street lights reflect off the damp ground, and if she could peel the look from his eyes, that dank desperation—

(The realization hits them then; as life is wont to teach you in its cruel barbaritiy, that sometimes your best isn't enough. He'd learned, he thought, after Jess, after everything, and there's nothing elegant in the stretch of his arms over her body. nothing elegant in the harsh cut of his jaw. That look in his eyes, like he can save her, makes her chest rattle and shudder all over again).

The hard pretty pearls of his eyes, not ever blank.

There's the glitter and smatter of blood, the echoing of his voice like a bombshell in her brain, and then she gasps, head breaking the surface, and she says, without meaning to,

"It hurts, John—" And she's thinking about the epidural, suddenly the one she didn't get for Taylor's birth, she's thinking of her small scrawny son (not even this can hurt like that, the pushing of something from nothing, before: space, and after: a child, nothing hurts like your body being ripped in two)- what's the point in drugs for childbirth when you don't get them for motherhood, for being a solider; you don't get the drugs for forgetting the violence brought onto the innocent, the violent you're wont to see as a cop.

All you get is the satisfaction of knowing that you wake up the same person.

You get to wake up—
(but she won't)

Her sob echoes.

(She's dying. her grief; unstoppered. the pungency of the blood. his hands are so, so tight around her. his hands, warm and dry, under the light, under her chin, in her hair.

"Stay with me. Joss, speak to me. I can't loose you." As if he has a choice in letting her go. She's slipping away, in his arms, his face peeled up towards the vast black stretch of the sky.

"Joss-"

(I love you).

There's a pause, a breath, a rattle of her lungs.

Then, blessedly.
Nothing.

(There is nothing, save a body and some blood, save a man and a women and enough grief to fill an ocean. There is nothing here, except the shell of a man and the Woman, the Woman who was, is, everything).

There is nothing.

("If anything happens, I'll hate your forever."

"You're stuck with me, remember?" His voice, like gravel sliding down a mountain, like the crunch of a boot against bone.)

It was never supposed to be like this.

there's no one I'd rather be with at the end.

.

.

.

(it was never supposed to be like this)

IImagine the scene, if you will:

Here in New York, (once home and yet, less so, now) here in a hospital ward. And our characters; featuring our boy (who really isn't a boy now, seeing as he's just morphed into a man, not by choice but by consequence of a mother with too brave a heart), and a man built like a tall lean bullet, another man with the hand on hiss cane trembling. That same inexplicable grief too, except for now, it's doubled, tripled, as grief is wont to do. Grief travels. Multiplies. Eats everything in its wake, as if it is enough.

(The thing about grief: how does not stop).

"She was always out saving everyone but me." The boy says. In anger, in pain, fists clenched in two. Face drawn, gaunt, too haunted a child, the gaping wound of his mother's absence like—what? A knife? A bullet? A jagged hole in his chest?

"It was for you," The man rasps, as if this is a consolation. And the look in the boy's eyes at that. Like he could kill.

(There's a break in the air, where John feels it before he before it, like he felt the two bullets land in the cavern of his chest and knew was was next, knew it was Carter knew it was his heart and hers about to break. This is to say, it happens suddenly, but not without warning.

For Taylor, to his credit, is light on his feet. His fists are raised, eyes red with tears, but when he swings out, it is with all the control and precision in the world; knuckles slamming against the sharp lines of John's cheek so hard he doubles back.

The only reason it lands is because John allows it.

(The only reason he can throw that punch is because John taught him).

"Is this really what you want." says John, in the silence where Taylor cradles his hands and hides his shame and grief in the shadows cast in the corner, no question mark tacked at the end because John's suddenly distracted by how Carter's eyes stare up at him from Taylor's face.

The flash of hurt in the boy's eyes is a bullet all over. (Or rather, two more he should've taken). But the kid straightens his posture and juts out his chin. His lower lip wobbles, like he might hit John again, or burst into tears. Maybe a combination of both.

"You said you had her back." Taylor says, halting, his whole body trembling, because without warning the tectonic plates of his life are shifting under his feet and there's suddenly no place to fall, no one to catch you. His eyes are bright. "You said you'd protect her."

(this is the type of grief that sends men to madness).

"Because she loved you." John closes his eyes. That hurts, more than it should, hurts, just like he deserves.

"Taylor—"

"She loved you enough to die for. But what about me!?" And there it is, that violence tucked in his pain, anger so much easier to reach for than anything else. He is a child, left, grasping for straws, grasping into darkness.

"She didn't love me enough to keep living. But you—" Taylor begins to weep, deep gulping, rasping sobs that shake his chest. (John wants to die. He looks down at his hands, sees her blood, that blood on her face should've been his, he looks up, and sees the anguish etched in sharp tears that cut down Taylor's cheeks.

He's not sure if he can live with this.)

"I'm sorry."

"That's not enough."

"Then what is? What can I do—"

"You bring her back! You're fucking Superman- I believed in you like I believed in her-Bring her back." A pause. The torrent slows. John's breath comes faster in his chest.

"She was thinking of you to the end." John places his hands on the sides of Taylor's face. It is meant to be a comforting gesture. (He refuses to lose this last piece of her.)

"She was my mother." This grief, spreading through his chest like wildfire, spilling out in hot torrents down his cheeks. He clings to the back of John's shirt. (He owes her this. Owns them, this). His back, like unslacked marble, his hands, cradling the back of Taylor's head. "She was my mother." John's arm is tense around Taylor's shoulder, but he does not let it fall.

"There's nothing any of us could have done."

"There's always something, always, always.

(There's this.

Jocelyn Carter was dead for 2 minutes and 40 seconds, 180 seconds. She lived, and loved, and died, and lived again. This could be a miracle, or science, or maybe, everyone is too wrapped up in their reliefguiltgrief to look a gift horse in the mouth).

This is what Joss sees, 12 days later, when she wakes (for good this time) Her son, who is older, somehow, and a man with hard pearls for eyes. But when he turns, and looks at her—it strips away.

(He is a boy, with blue eyes, his heart in his mouth. He is a man, bound to her.

This is what she sees when she wakes.
(The one ones that ever really mattered).